


Five laws of protagonist-centered morality

by Metabird (wheatear)



Series: Approaches to storytelling [6]
Category: Fandom - Fandom, The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Character Archetypes, Ethical Dilemmas, Gen, Meta, Morality, Nonfiction, Protagonist-Centered Morality, The Originals Spoilers, The Vampire Diaries Season 4 Spoilers, Tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 22:33:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23084170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheatear/pseuds/Metabird
Summary: Protagonist-centered morality works because we're invested in the protagonists. So what happens when we're not? A meta commentary on the implications of protagonist-centered morality and fandom discussion.
Series: Approaches to storytelling [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1653421
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	Five laws of protagonist-centered morality

**Author's Note:**

> This meta uses an example from The Vampire Diaries 4x12 "A View to a Kill", so there are spoilers for that episode.

This post is brought to you by Elena Gilbert and my own bizarre experience during _The Vampire Diaries_ Season 4 where it was like a switch flipped in my brain and I was watching the show backwards. See, by that point I was firmly on Team Originals to the extent that I was watching the show _as if the Originals were the main characters_ and Elena, Stefan, Damon and co were the antagonists. And let me tell you, that is a painful, painful experience. Never root for the show-designated antagonists. They always lose.  
  
In fact, there are several types of characters you should never root for if you want to enjoy consuming media:  
  
1) The antagonist. Even the ones that the creators obviously adore, because they might stick around longer but they will still lose.  
2) The lovesick fool. That character who was created purely to mope or pine after the designated love interest, but never to win them or even find happiness.  
3) The parent or mentor. If they're not the main characters, they'll probably die. At best they can hope to stick around in the background as minor characters.  
4) The rival. The rival's job is to try and beat the hero and to fail. It won't end well.  
5) The loyal sidekick. This is the least painful example, but if you're expecting the loyal sidekick to ever have a life of their own or do something other than support the hero, you will be frequently disappointed.  
  
There are always exceptions of course, but is it really a risk worth taking?  
  
Personally I tend to gravitate towards character types 1 and 2, and I know I'm going to be sad and disappointed every time but I still root for them, dammit. Combine more than one type into the same character for maximum pain! Anyway, the reason the above character types can be so painful to watch is because they all lose out in some way to the basic maxim of protagonist-centered morality, which is this:  
  
**The protagonist achieves their goal.**  
  
That by itself doesn't have any moral implications as such, until you start to consider the _cost_ of achieving that goal. Then it gets interesting. I'm going to use an example from _The Vampire Diaries_ to lay out five laws of protagonist-centered morality. Bear with me. This is a long one.  
  
**The first law of protagonist-centered morality: Reverse the irreversible**  
So there I was rooting for the Originals, the show-designated antagonists, during TVD Season 4. That season really is extraordinary if you think about what the main characters were trying to achieve. The main quest is the search for the cure, so that Elena can become human again after she was turned into a vampire in the previous season. Which brings us to our first law of protagonist-centered morality:  
  
1) If something **irreversibly bad** happens to the protagonist, it **must be reversed at all costs!** The supporting cast will jump to reverse this terrible thing even if that very same thing happened to other people they care about and they never considered fixing it then.  
  
You could also call this "the rules don't apply to the protagonist" law, because god knows they never do. If there's a get-out clause, it's always reserved for the protagonist. Elena Gilbert is not the first person to have been turned into a vampire against her own will. But as soon as it happens to her, suddenly the search for the cure becomes the most important thing ever and everyone is trying to get hold of it.  
  
Anyway, you might think that searching for a cure isn't so bad in itself. Yes, the characters are putting Elena's humanity above anyone else who might have been turned into a vampire, but that's their prerogative. Not like it will harm anyone else if they fix Elena, right?  
  
**The second law of protagonist-centered morality: Everyone else is disposable**  
Right. So, lest we forget, it turns out that in order to find the cure, Elena's brother Jeremy has to kill a shitton of vampires in order to reveal the literal map on his skin, blah blah hunter's mark, there's some lore here that I don't remember well and won't go into. Long story short: the route to finding the cure is through a pile of dead vampires. Great! Here we come to our second law of protagonist-centered morality:  
  
2) Disposable characters are disposable! The protagonist and friends can **murder or do harm to as many faceless goons as they want** if it helps them to achieve their goals. The life and well-being of the protagonist and friends is worth more than the countless multitudes who die in their way.  
  
I think TVD Season 4 is particularly egregious because usually the faceless goons are bad guys getting in the way of the heroes trying to storm a castle or escape or something, so they've put themselves in the line of fire. It's not so bad killing someone who's also trying to kill you. But in this case, our heroes actively plot to murder an Original in order to trigger the deaths of all the vampires in their bloodline. We're talking mass murder of literally hundreds or thousands of vampires, we don't know how many, vampires who have done nothing to our protagonists other than happen to be the unlucky descendants of the Original that the heroes decide to kill. It's honestly the most extreme example of this trope I can think of, where there's just no way you can argue that the victims are bad guys or working for the bad guys or even that they got in the way of the protagonists. They're so faceless we don't even see them. We only see the results of all those vampires dying.  
  
And again, let's not forget, the reason they're doing this isn't to save anyone's life or save the world or rescue anyone. Elena is in no immediate danger. They just want to make her human again, which means they've decided that Elena's humanity is more important than the lives of hundreds or thousands of vampires.  
  
Even if you weren't rooting for the Originals, are you still rooting for Elena at this point?  
  
**The third law of protagonist-centered morality: Press the big red button**  
But wait. There's more. You see, we then learn that the location of the cure is also home to the Biggest Bad to Ever Bad! We get dire warnings of ancient world-ending prophecies. We hear about Silas, our Big Bad, and learn that waking him up is a Super Bad Idea, Don't Do It, Protagonists. And here we come to the third law of protagonist-centered morality:  
  
3) The protagonist can **press that big red button**! Don't sweat it, protagonist! What the protagonist wants is more important than all those dire warnings. Sure, they'll realise they messed up later, but it'll turn out fine in the end and no one will punish them for it.  
  
Essentially, the protagonist is allowed to make some serious mistakes that may well have gotten anyone else killed, but don't worry, they'll fix it in the end.

Who cares that getting the cure also means waking up the Big Bad? (I'm pretty sure that Damon actually says something like this.) Who cares? The cure is more important. They'll deal with Silas, no biggie.  
  
Anyway, to recap. The situation in Season 4 is this. The characters plot to **murder thousands of vampires** by proxy via killing an Original and to **wake up a potentially world-ending Big Bad**, all to give the cure to Elena. She isn't even sick! She's fine! Being a vampire isn't that bad on TVD but even if she were on her deathbed, would any of this be justified?  
  
**The fourth law of protagonist-centered morality: The antagonist must be stopped**  
So. Enter the Originals. In this case it's Kol, because he happens to be the most disposable. Kol's goal is to stop the protagonists from finding the cure, because he knows it will wake up Silas. It's also fair to say that he doesn't want to die, but he doesn't know at this point that Elena is planning to kill him. So in essence, Kol's goal is to **prevent the end of the world**.  
  
Let me just repeat that.  
  
The goal of the show-designated antagonist, the character we are supposed to be rooting against, is to **prevent the end of the world**. Which brings me to the fourth law of protagonist-centered morality.  
  
4) It doesn't matter what the antagonist wants. Their goals conflict with the protagonist's goals and they **must be stopped.**  
  
Kol was trying to make sure that the protagonists didn't find the cure because he didn't want to risk waking up Silas. I was rooting for him all the way, man. It was so, so painful to see him lose.  
  
**The fifth law of protagonist-centered morality: The protagonist is so sorry that they hurt you**  
And here is where my example collapses and I'll have to look elsewhere. Did any of our protagonists express any regret for what they did to find the cure? Nope! They weren't sorry because they don't care about the antagonists or faceless dead vampires. The closest we got was Stefan expressing some sympathy to Rebekah as I recall, but he was manipulating her so I don't think it counts.  
  
But if there had been a cost to one of their friends, that would bring us to the fifth and final law of protagonist-centered morality:  
  
5) When the protagonist inevitably has to **do something bad to someone they care about** to save the day or achieve their goals, they will be **very sorry** about it. They're so sorry. They're so upset. Let's really linger on how upset they are and how hard it was for them to do that terrible thing.  
  
It never stops them, by the way. That's a crucial part of this law. They might cry and the story will wring out every possible inch of angst it can from this plotline, but if the protagonist has to be ruthless to achieve their goals, they will be. My favourite example of this is Klaus blubbing when he kills his own father in _The Originals_, but there are plenty of examples in TVD too. Elena having Jeremy's memory wiped comes to mind.  
  
**Aren't these laws just how stories work?**  
I mean, I just made them up right now so I'm not sure how universal they are, but in writing this post and thinking about what protagonist-centered morality means and what it looks like across different canons... Yeah, I think there is a tautology going on here.  
  
Stories are protagonist-centered. That is the literal definition of what a protagonist is.  
  
We (usually) root for the protagonist in a story. We want them to achieve their goal. The protagonist achieving their goal is the point of the story, and I've also said that it is the fundamental principle of protagonist-centered morality. The moral implications of what that goal is and how the protagonist achieves it is where it starts to get interesting.  
  
I think there are two things going on here that we as audiences often conflate.  
  
The first thing is what I will call, for lack of a better word, the **objective moral reality** of the characters' actions in the story. This is the bit where we separate the heroes from the anti-heroes, discuss the ethical dilemmas the characters find themselves in, all that fun stuff. In other words, are the characters actually right or wrong?  
  
The second thing is the question of **are the characters we subjectively care about being done right by the story**. This is where it gets really interesting, because in theory if the character you care about is the protagonist, then you shouldn't notice the protagonist-centered morality except in the first sense above where you might find it interesting to discuss the ethical implications of their actions. But if you care about a different character, if for some reason you're rooting for a character other than the protagonist to achieve their goals, then suddenly you're coming up against the **narrative structure of the story itself**. The narrative is against you. You are against the narrative.  
  
What happens then?  
  
**When do we notice protagonist-centered morality?**  
Let's go back to the original example. What happened to me in Season 4 of TVD? Why did I switch from supporting Elena and co to supporting the Originals? When did the moral dissonance of what the main characters were doing really kick in?  
  
Was I rooting for Kol because he was doing the right thing and the protagonists were doing the wrong thing? No, not as such. My reaction wasn't based on the objective moral reality of the characters' actions. I loved the Originals long before this episode and I was already inclined to support them over the main cast. But this episode was the first time that there was an _alignment_ between my preference for the Originals and how sympathetic their goals were compared to the protagonists i.e. they were right and the protagonists were wrong. In other words, the Originals had more sympathetic motivations than the main cast, and that's when my brain made the switch. It wasn't a conscious thing. It just happened.  
  
The above point is important, by the way. It's not an aside. I don't think it's enough for one side to have the more sympathetic/morally correct goals in order for the audience to root for them. The audience also needs to be **invested in those characters**. Let's be honest: We only care about the fallacy of protagonist-centered morality when our favourite characters suffer as a result of it.  
  
There are four possible scenarios regarding the objective moral reality of the characters' actions in the story:  
  
a) Sympathetic protagonists / Unsympathetic antagonists  
b) Sympathetic protagonists / Sympathetic antagonists  
c) Unsympathetic protagonists / Sympathetic antagonists  
d) Unsympathetic protagonists / Unsympathetic antagonists  
  
A is easy. It's the traditional tale of good hero vs evil villain. No cognitive dissonance here.  
  
B is brilliant when it's done right and you are invested in characters on both sides. _Game of Thrones_ is a great example of a show that does this well because it follows a large cast of sympathetic characters with conflicting goals.  
  
You typically see D in a show like _The Originals_ where basically the villains are your heroes. C though... C is interesting, and C is exactly where Season 4 of TVD messed me up. **C is where the reality of protagonist-centered morality which you find in all four scenarios is the most exposed.** It becomes more obvious because when you take a step back from the situation and look at what the characters are trying to achieve and why, you realise how screwed up it is.  
  
But here's the thing. That's not enough. You still have to be invested in the characters to really make that flip. **Protagonist-centered morality works because we're invested in the protagonists.** It doesn't matter what the scenario is, whether it's a, b, c or d, it doesn't matter whether the protagonists are sympathetic or not. If we're invested, we'll still root for them over the antagonists. We might not even notice that the antagonists have a point, or if we do, we don't care. We want the protagonists to get what they want.  
  
That's why I think it's when you become invested in characters other than the protagonist, especially the antagonist because naturally they are the ones most opposed to the protagonist, that you start to notice the flaws of protagonist-centered morality and to question the story in that way. In other words, it's only **when the characters we subjectively care about aren't being done right by the story** that we start _using_ the **objective moral reality** of their actions to challenge the storytelling.  
  
I suspect that many arguments in fandom are based on this error, because they assume the following:  
  
My argument is based on an objective moral stance or characters doing the right thing in some way.  
  
When in actual fact, that argument is going to depend on **which characters they are invested in** because it's only once you're invested in a character that you're going to care about the moral implications of what happens to them. An argument like that will typically ignore points that are not in the preferred character's favour (Kol tried to cut Jeremy's arms off! He's a sadistic prick!) and will emphasize only those that show the preferred character in a positive light.  
  
I can sit here until I'm blue in the face and say that Kol was right. He was right! He was trying to stop Elena and co from doing something monumentally stupid. But the reason I care, the reason I not only noticed the moral dissonance but got really angry over it, was because I'm invested in the Originals more than I'm invested in Elena and co.  
  
I think it's helpful to remember that when having any discussion about the morality or otherwise of any characters' actions. Who are we rooting for? When does protagonist-centered morality bother us, and when doesn't it bother us? When do we start to call it bad storytelling? Why are we saying it's bad storytelling? What does that mean?  
  
I've made a lot of assumptions and there are a lot of thoughts I haven't fully fleshed out, but I'll stop here. Discussion is very welcome!


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